


Jedi and the Sith

by thedunesea



Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Beauty and the Beast AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:20:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27372577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedunesea/pseuds/thedunesea
Summary: When his Padawan is captured by an unknown Sith Lord who lives in a castle in the middle of an Outer Rim desert planet, Jedi Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi has no other choice than to trade his own freedom for hers. Little he knows that the coarse and unrefined Sith has spent years waiting for someone to break the ancient curse that was cast upon him...Tale as old as timeSong as old as rhymeJedi and the Sith
Relationships: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi/Darth Vader
Comments: 17
Kudos: 117





	1. Prologue. Vincit qui se vincit

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, there lived a mother and her son. They lived in a small, dusty hovel on a desert planet, and they were slaves. Yet they were happy, for they loved each other dearly, and deep in her heart the mother hoped that one day her son would be free.

What she did not know was that his true enslavement was to his own heart.

Nightmares plagued him as he grew up, visions of her disappearing into the darkness in the Sand People’s land. As time passed, the fear of his nightmares turned into anger and hate, and his love for his mother turned into greed.

But then, one summer’s day, a woman of the Sand People came to their home, and offered him a simple stone in return for shelter from the approaching sandstorm.

Repulsed by her appearance, the son sneered at the gift, and turned the woman away.

The woman’s rags disappeared to reveal the noble dignity of a Jedi Knight. The son tried to apologize, but it was too late, for the Jedi knew that he was the Chosen One of prophecies of old, and the darkness in his heart was a danger for them all.

To teach the son the horrors of the Dark Side, the Jedi transformed him into a hideous Sith, more machine than man, and brought him to a secluded palace in the desert.

Desperate because of her son’s doom, the mother begged the Jedi for mercy, so he transformed her into an enchanted rose, which would bloom until her son’s twenty-second year. If he could learn to love another without greed and earn their love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a Sith for all time.

When he first heard the harsh breathing of his armored prison, the  young man fell into despair and lost all hope.

For who could ever learn to love a Sith?


	2. The castle

“Ugh.” Ahsoka Tano tried again to punch in the command to reverse thrusters, but to no avail: the insolent console blinked red and her fighter stubbornly remained on the trajectory it had chosen for itself. “Master, my commands are fried,” she yelled into her comm as she shot another burst of laserfire towards their pursuers. One of the vulture droids exploded in a shower of sparks and debris, clouding for a moment the yellow sphere of the planet looming before them.

“ _Nice shot. I’ll take care of the fighters.”_ As always, her Master sounded poised and calm. It was no wonder: Knight Obi-Wan Kenobi, the infamous Negotiator, was renown throughout the galaxy for his dignified demeanor even in the face of catastrophe. Ahsoka wished she could share even a bit of that self-confidence. _“Now try and find a good place to land_. _I’m afraid our_ _hyperspace_ _rings_ _are as good as gone._ ”

“A good place to crash, you mean,” she muttered as she tried to divert all power to the engines in the hope that the fighter would stop disobeying her command.

_“It depends on your point of view, my young Padaw – look out!”_

Ahsoka _had been_ looking out, and had seen the torpedo coming, but there was little she could do with an unresponsive ship. The impact rattled the cockpit and made her slam her head against the console; a little dazed, she straightened just in time to see with dismay her starboard wing breaking off from the fighter’s chassis and falling down towards the planted.

“Master, I’m hit, and I’m falling!” she yelled as she tried to stabilize the ship, but she already knew it was of no use. Completely unbalanced and already in the planet’s gravity well, the fighter began plummeting down in free fall towards the yellowish surface.

“Blast it,” she groaned as she resorted, as a last chance, to shut down and restart all systems. It was a dangerous move, cutting out all the power, but it worked: when the console came back to life, the commands blinked green. “ _Ugggggh_ ,” she grunted as she steered, reaching out into the Force to help the engines stabilize and guide her ship into something resembling a controlled crash.

She plunged through the atmosphere in the night part of the planet and found herself staring at an endless expanse of dark gray sand lit by two half moons. Tortuous pinnacles of rock rose high before her, sharp maws of the desert; gritting her teeth, she steered clear of the rocks, and bracing for impact she yelled all her hopes to the heavens as she watched the dark dunes rise to meet her.

*

Ahsoka hadn’t yet crawled out of the charred pile of debris that had been her fighter when the telltale sound of incoming ships drew out a curse from her lips.

The hunting senses and night vision of her Togruta heritage let her assess the situation with a short glance around. The droid fighters were closing on her from above, and not even her lightsabers could do much against two fully-armored ships. Thankfully, while deadly in space-battle, the Separatist fighters were not meant for low atmospheric combat, and much less for chasing a lone sentient. Their scanners were probably already overloaded by all the input coming from the planet, and wouldn’t be immediately able to sense her small body.

She had managed to land on the eastern edge of the sandy wasteland, close enough to the high rock pinnacles she had seen from above, twisted towers whose dark shapes looked even more jarringly immense from beneath. But they meant safety – and water, she hoped. She hadn’t survived a space battle, a hyperspace chase and a crash landing to die of dehydration on this blasted dustball.

Calling onto the Force for sustenance, she sprinted into a fast jog, and had almost reached the safety of the canyons when her luck abandoned her, and the dunes exploded around her into columns of sand. As laserfire encircled her on all sides Ahsoka closed her eyes, relying on pure instinct to survive as she jumped like a crazed sand panther to avoid the fire. Salvation grew nearer with every passing moment; she could smell the metallic taste of water trapped into the rock, the dampness cooling the air by a fraction of degree.

Grunting, she forced her body into one last desperate spring; the air howled around her as she ran, the sound of the wind almost stronger than that of the explosions and the humming of the enemy engines. Her feet were flying on the sand. _Just a little more_ , she thought. _Run, Ahsoka, run._

At last the rock cathedral beyond the dunes closed upon her. _A tunnel_ , the Force whispered. _On your left._ She opened her eyes and there it was, a black gaping mouth in the rock, manmade and so craftily hidden among the rocks that, without that subtle hint, she wouldn’t have noticed it even in daylight. With a yell, she jumped, landing on a roll right inside the cave. The roaring engines of the Separatist fighters passed her over, continuing their blind and now futile chase.

“And you thought that becoming a Padawan would be fun,” she groaned as she let herself fall on the ground. Wondering whether her Master had managed to get rid of the droids, she tapped the comlink on her vambrace. “Master, come in.”

Only a buzz of static came as an answer. She groaned again. Of course her comlink had to stop working. Well, at least her short-range homing beacon looked like it was still operational. Otherwise, she had no idea of how Master Kenobi could ever find her.

The adventures of the day were beginning to take their toll on her, but she couldn’t afford the luxury of rest, not if she was cut off from communication with the outside world: her comlink was short-range only, and her ship’s comm system had been certainly fried in the crash. She needed to find water, and soon: when the sun rose the heat would likely become unbearable, and her sprint had made her sweat.

When her breathing had returned to normal and her heart didn’t feel as if it was going to burst out of her chest, Ahsoka lit one of her sabers to light her way and set to walk through the tunnel. The Force hummed with hope, and she followed its lead. It was a long and tiring hike down in the bowels of the planet, across an eerie underworld of deep fissures and steep ridges, and then up, spiraling inside one of the rocky pillars. In another circumstance, it would have been beautiful.

One hour passed, and then another, and a third. Ahsoka had lost count of time when the dwindling path took a sharp turn to the left, and all of a sudden Ahsoka found herself in the open.

What lay before her took her breath away.

She was standing on a small ridge overlooking a plateau enclosed on all sides by a jagged crown of rocky towers. A scatter of pools in slight incline rose from the flatland at the bottom of the ridge towards the eastern edge of the plateau, glistening like as many mirrors of silver glass under the light of the moons. A labyrinth of channels and waterfalls connected the pools and brought the life-giving water to lush patches of bushes and trees. Crowning this mirage was the most beautiful palace Ahsoka had ever beheld, marble columns and curved walls rising like a tiara from the sand.

“Well, water won’t be a problem,” Ahsoka said as soon as she regained the ability to speak. The vision was so otherworldly that, hadn’t it been for the Force telling her that it was all true, she would have thought it a mirage induced by the heat. Something like a shiver at the base of her neck told her to stay on guard. There was something strange at work here, something she didn’t quite like. Slowly she set to the steep descent.

At the feet of the ridge, Ahsoka reached the tall marble wall that encircled the oasis in every direction. It was a huge work, and useless: the gate, carved in the shape of entwining branches of a thousand thorny stems from which sprung numberless delicate rosebuds, was open.

She stepped inside and crossed the garden, ascending towards the looming palace. It was even more beautiful from here, the water gurgling and glistening in the starlight and the flowers gifting their perfume to the warm wind.

But it was terrifying, too. There was not a bird to be heard nor an insect to be seen. The trees, the bushes, the flowers and the grass weren’t real: they were carved in marble or wrung out of bronze or silver or gold, and the flowers were colored glass or glazed porcelain and precious stones. A myriad of shapes inhabited this unearthly paradise, dancers and warriors and heroes of pale stone, their delicate features so perfectly chiseled that they seemed to move in the starlight, but they were destined instead to remain forever like this, beautiful and young and still.

Ahsoka came out of her reverie with a distinct bad feeling growing in the pit of her stomach alongside her mounting hunger, and realized she had reached the enormous entrance to the palace. Just like the outer gate, this too was carved in the likeness of a rose garden with silver stems and petals of sapphire. Clutching the hilt of her lightsaber, Ahsoka knocked at the door. No answer came, but the door opened before her. Taking a deep breath, she stepped inside and found herself into a room big enough to fit half a dozen of gunships; beautiful carved doors opened on each side of the antechamber, and a wide staircase on the opposite end disappeared into the darkness of an unlit gallery on the second story. Around her, moonlight fell silent on the floor through rows of tall arched windows, bathing the marble tiles in silver light.

“Hello?”

Her voice echoed in the vast emptiness. Again, no answer came.

“Hello? Is anybody home? I – I don’t mean to intrude, but I crashed my ship and I need shelter.”

Ahsoka thought she heard a faint beeping noise from somewhere at her left. Bracing herself, she followed the sound.

A metallic voice came from somewhere beyond the second door. “Hush! Do you want to be heard, you malfunctioning little twerp?”

Ahsoka couldn’t repress a snort. The vocabulary and tone of whoever had spoken were quite at odds with the poetic surroundings.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” she said, hanging her lightsaber back to her belt and advancing slowly with her hands raised. “I just need some food and a comm unit to ask for help.”

She opened the door and found herself inside what had once been a cozy but elegant living room: bookshelves lined the walls around a fine marble coffee table and two ancient armchairs. The beautiful furniture, though, was now covered by a scatter of droid limbs and spare parts; grease stained the velvet lining of the armchairs, and the table was barely discernible under a pile of ship schematics.

A flash of blue caught her eyes, a movement in the shadows at the far right corner of the room.

“Hi, little one,” she saluted.

A cheerful chirping answered her greeting, and a small astromech droid came forward, followed by a tall, lanky protocol droid who began gesticulating wildly.

“Artoo Deetoo, do you see what you have done? What will the Master say? He will reduce us to scraps!”

Dropping to her knees to pat the astromech on its dome, Ahsoka laughed. “Hello to you too! Aren’t you a little too nervous for a droid?”

The astromech let out what sounded like an amused answer.

“I don’t have any loose wires, you impertinent pest.” After this, apparently the protocol droid’s programming kicked in and overcame his anxiety, and he bowed slightly at Ahsoka. “I am C-3P0, human-cyborg relations, and I am nervous only because I am fluent in more than six million forms of communications, which makes my understanding of what my Master would – oh, we are doomed!”

Startled by the sudden terror in the droid’s voice, Ahsoka sprung to her feet, lightsaber in hand. The familiar _hiss_ she heard, though, didn’t come from her weapon but from a garish red line that had appeared in the darkness.

_*_

“Flying is for droids,” Obi-Wan Kenobi muttered as he blasted the last vulture out of the sky and passed over the wreckage of what had once been his apprentice’s ship. Hadn’t he known with the bone-deep certainty of the Force that Ahsoka was still alive, he would never have thought she could have survived such a crash.

After almost three years of partnership, Obi-Wan had learnt that once gangly youngling he had met on Christophsis was made of a much tougher matter than met the eye. Smiling to himself, he checked the signal of her homing beacon, which, unlike her comlink, was still working, and set to follow.

The beacon brought him over the rocky formation that rose like sharp fangs in what his navicomp told him were the Jundland Wastes, a rock and sand wasteland on the borders of the Dune Sea, Tatooine’s largest desert.

Not many things could surprise a Jedi Knight as experienced as he was, but when his fighter crossed the highest ridge in the center of the maze of canyons, he cried out in surprise.

With a swift, precise touch he maneuvered his fighter into a smooth landing just outside the main gate of a palace that, by all. The Force shivered with anticipation around him, but there was an unsettling quality to it.

“I have a very bad feeling about this,” he told his fighter, then shook his head and set to rescue his Padawan from whatever bizarre situation she had gotten herself into this time.

He crossed the garden in a light jog, briefly admiring how the first rays of the sun reflected in all hues of golden and red on the gurgling water and the orange rock below, but when he reached the staircase that led into the manor all thoughts of beauty were forgotten.

A tide of pain and ferocious rage washed over him, making him stagger. Only once before he had felt such Darkness in the Force: on Naboo, when his Master had died.

“Sith,” he spat, and lightsaber in hand he ran towards where he could sense his Padawan.

*

The luminous thread between Master and Apprentice brought Obi-Wan to the top of what he thought was the highest tower in the castle, up a long spiral staircase and on a cold landing flanked on all sides by spare cells of dark stone. Empty torch sconces hung from the cracked walls.

He found Ahsoka huddled on the floor of the farthest cell, imprisoned behind a ray-shield wall. _Good girl_ , he thought. He had never sensed her so afraid in all their years together, fear oozing from her in dark waves, but she was reacting to it like a true Jedi: she was sitting on the floor cross-legged, deep into her meditation.

“Ahsoka,” he murmured, kneeling on the other side of the red barrier. “Padawan. I’m here.”

Her eyes snapped open.

“Master!” She paled, and her eyes, if possible, went wider. “Go, leave, now! He’s… there is a Sith Lord!”

“Calm down, Padawan,” Obi-Wan said firmly. “I know. Take a deep breath. Let go of your fear and help me find the controls to lift this ray shield.”

“But he’s a Sith Lord!”

Obi-Wan offered her a crooked grin. “Yes. And what have I told you about Sith Lords?”

One corner of her lips lifted in a half-hearted smile. “They’re our specialty.”

The harsh sound of a mechanical respirator came from somewhere right below them; heavy footsteps were climbing down the stairway that led to the dungeon.

“It was foolish of you to come here, Jedi.”

The low rumble of the artificial voice sent a chill down Obi-Wan’s spine, and for the briefest moment he felt a spark of recognition, like some half-forgotten memory from a childhood nightmare. The Force shivered around him, and he shifted into a ready stance, his grip on his still unlit weapon just slightly less confident than usual.

“It was foolish of you to imprison my Padawan,” he said, and was glad when his voice came out cool and composed.

“She shouldn’t have come here.”

“Hey! The door was open!” Ahsoka protested; Obi-Wan was in equal measure alarmed and proud of her boldness. “How could I expect to find a Sith Lord in a fancy castle?”

“Ahsoka, please, don’t get snippy on him,” Obi-Wan reprimanded her. It was entertaining, but hardly useful. “I think we could negotiate the terms of her release,” he said, addressing once again the dark shape of the Sith Lord, hidden in the shadows at the other end of the corridor, so thick that Obi-Wan could only make out his huge, humanoid silhouette.

“There will be no release. I have been waiting for years to take my revenge on the Jedi.”

Obi-Wan had no idea of what that could mean, since the only Sith to which the Jedi had ever done something worth avenging was Darth Maul, and Darth Maul was most definitely very dead.

“Ahsoka here isn’t _technically_ a Jedi Knight,” he said, trying to buy time and shutting down her protests with an imperious gesture. “She is only an apprentice, if an excellent one.”

“I don’t care.”

 _Blast it. Well, of course_. Truth be told, deep down he had known where this was going since the moment he’d seen Ahsoka behind the ray-shield. “I, on the contrary, _am_ a Jedi Knight, and the only one to have killed a Sith Lord in a thousand of years.” If nothing else, it felt good to be entitled for once to boast his victory over Darth Maul. “I propose you take me in her place.”

Ahsoka let out a strangled cry. “No! No, Master, no!”

Obi-Wan silenced her with a cold sideways glance. Faint but distinctly audible, the beeping sound of a droid came from somewhere near the Sith Lord.

“Master,” a pompous mechanical voice said. “Artoo here says that this Jedi might be the one –”

“Silence!” the Sith yelled, eliciting a gasp from his interlocutor. “I know that.” He seemed to be pondering some unfathomable conundrum, and for a long stretch of tense seconds the only sound in the deepening silence was the Sith’s harsh breath.

“You would do this? For her?” he said at last, deep voice echoing in the thick darkness.

“Any Jedi would.”

Again, the Sith seemed to ponder his answer; Obi-Wan couldn’t stop his eyebrow from arching in a quizzical frown. Whoever he was, there was something unsettling about this Sith, something that went beyond the mere perturbation of Darkness.

“Come into the light,” the Sith said.

Now totally at loss, Obi-Wan obeyed and took a step forward to the pool of moonlight that flooded the center of the corridor from a small window high in the wall. He felt the weight of the Sith’s attention as he assessed him; with what criterion, Obi-Wan was none the wiser.

“Fine,” the Sith said eventually, apparently approving of what he had seen. “Take her away.”

A monstrous droid Obi-Wan had passed on his way to the dungeon entered the room and, before either of them had time to move, entered Ahsoka’s cell, grabbed her and steered her away. Ahsoka tried to struggle against it, but it was no use.

“Master! Master! I won’t leave you!”

The pain and the terror in her voice hurt Obi-Wan deeply; he wanted nothing more than to run to her and comfort her, but he forced himself to remain stoic. He could show no weakness in front of a Sith – for Ahsoka’s sake as much as his.

“May the Force be with you, Padawan,” he simply said as she disappeared from his sight, still screaming and kicking.

Breathing deeply, Obi-Wan turned to look at his captor, but the Sith seemed engrossed in a deep conversation with an astromech droid – probably the one he had heard before. He couldn’t help it when his eyebrows shot toward his hairline at the sight – and at the fact that, apparently, the Sith spoke _binary_.

From what Obi-Wan could judge, the droid prevailed.

“Very well then,” the Sith said, before turning to Obi-Wan. "Your lightsaber, Master Jedi."

Slowly, Obi-Wan unclipped his lightsaber from his belt, lingering on the familiar weight in his hand for a moment before handing it to the Sith. He seemed to evaluate the armor with professional interest, then handed it over to the astromech droid, which made it disappear inside an hidden compartment in his chassis.

“I’ll show you to your room," the Sith said. 

“My room? You were keeping my _teenaged_ apprentice in a cell and now you’re showing me to my room?”

“Do you want to stay in the tower?”

“No, of course not,” Obi-Wan protested. He wasn’t a fan of uncivilized accommodations if he could avoid it.

“Then follow me,” the Sith Lord said, turning his lightsaber on with a _hiss_ , the garish blade lighting the path as they made their way through the castle, followed by the astromech droid and a protocol droid plated in gold. They were probably the most absurd parade the Galaxy had ever seen.

They crossed ballrooms and corridors, halls and staircases, and everything was beautiful and _littered_ with droid spare parts. Obi-Wan didn’t know what to think anymore.

Eventually, after another long spiral stairway that led them atop another tower, much large and cozier than the one where the cells were, they stopped in front of a large double door of white wood gilded in gold.

“These are your quarters,” the Sith Lord said harshly. “You will dine with me tonight.”

“Very well,” Obi-Wan said. Apparently, his compliance took the Sith by surprise.

“If you won’t eat with me, you won’t eat at all,” he growled, before turning and leaving a befuddled Obi-Wan with the two droids.

“So uncivilized,” Obi-Wan muttered under his breath, then entered his room.


End file.
